Post Production Journal

So total I have five interviews and about 6 and a half hours of footage of those interviews. I need to find a way of pulling out and organizing the best of those bits. Because doing that on paper would be disorganized and take me just as much time if not more than to do in Premiere, I decided to do most of my organization in the editing program.

The first thing I had to do was bring in all the video clips and audio clips from the interviews and color code them. This way I can easily identify which clips are of who when I mash them all together in the big edit.

Next I have to watch through all the interviews and pull out the parts I think are usable. I do this by deleting the sections that are unusable only to leave the usable pieces. This is what the interview looks like afterwards:

As I do this, I will copy these usable soundbites into separate sequences so that my soundbites are organized based on topic. After I go through all the interviews, this is what one of those categories may look like:

In total, my categories are:

Point of Films

Films being Good or Bad

Films as a Child

Getting into Films

Films Compared to Other Art Forms

Favorite and Least Favorite Films

Diversity in Films

Films Changing People

Films Helping People

What Don't we Like About Documentaries

Donnie Darko

A Brief History of Horror Movies

Advice

After acquiring all these, I get a general idea of how I want to structure of the piece to go. Which topics I want to go through first, and how to work through them. Then I go through the categories I want to use and pull out the best bits. Then I try and string them together coherently.

Finally I go through the cut and try and cut out as much excess bulk as possible until the piece is within the time limit.